In early Unix days, a well-known technical paper analogized the
lexical analyzer generator lex(1) to a Swiss-army knife; this was a comment
on the remarkable variety of more general uses discovered for a program
originally designed as a special-purpose code generator for writing
compilers. Two decades later, well-known hacker Henry Spencer described
the Perl scripting language as a “Swiss-Army
chainsaw”, intending to convey his evaluation of the language as
exceedingly powerful but ugly and noisy and prone to belch noxious fumes.
This had two results: (1) Perl fans adopted the epithet as a badge of
pride, and (2) it entered more general usage to describe software that is
highly versatile but distressingly inelegant.